UN Agency's Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

The ITU is referring specifically to proposals I first reported on in May from a trade group of European telephone companies known as ETNO. ETNO proposed radical changes to the ITRs that would mandate new Internet traffic transit arrangements in which content providers would pay tolls and taxes to local ISPs (many still run by national governments) to reach local users who requested their content.

The ETNO plan was widely seen as a desperation move by over-regulated European ISPs to subsidize their networks on the backs of high-volume content providers including YouTube, Netflix, and other video sites, most of which are headquartered outside the EU. But by requiring content providers to pay locally-set tolls to satisfy information requests by their own users, the plan would have signaled the end of Internet growth in much of the developing world.

In Europe earlier this month, sources told me that the ETNO proposal had yet to find a sponsor among the European member nations. But versions of similar Internet tax plans have since appeared in amendments offered by some African and Arab countries. These governments hope content taxes can somehow replace lost revenue from declining international long distance traffic, where rates were set artificially high, leading to rampant corruption.

According to the leaked document, the ITU believes that the anti-ETNO campaign got out of hand, unintentionally leading public advocacy groups on the left and the right to begin “attacking the ITU and WCIT for being insufficiently open and transparent.”

Without identifying the U.S.-based “lobbying group” behind what it acknowledges to be growing negative media coverage, the agency goes on to say that “the sponsors” of the campaign “did not realize that the attacks directed against WCIT would turn into general attacks on the ITU as a whole.” The internal document says that “[t]he lobbying group that initiated the campaign has probably lost control of it and regrets the intensity of the attacks against the ITU.”

In response to the anti-WCIT “campaign,” according to the September retreat’s preparatory materials, the ITU reluctantly launched a “counter-campaign,” which the agency believes “has been fairly successful outside the US and somewhat successful even in the US,” where “some of the statements made to denigrate ITU and WCIT are so extreme that they were easy to challenge and rebut.”

Going forward, the ITU focused at its meeting on the possibility of an “intensive anti-ratification campaign in OECD countries, based on the so-called lack of openness of the WCIT process, resulting in a significant number of countries refusing to ratify the new ITRs.” The ITU calls this possibility “the so-called ACTA scenario,” referring to sometimes violent protests against the secret ACTA treaty that took place this year.

To develop the next phase of its “counter-campaign,” the ITU hosted speakers from leading PR and advertising agencies to advise them on the use of social media. For example, Matthias Lufkens, Head of Digital Strategy for global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, gave a presentation on how his agency helped the World Economic Forum leverage tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr to fend off “occupy”-style protests that occurred both physically in Davos and on the Internet.

“There is a risk that [the ACTA scenario] will happen, but our communication campaign can mitigate this,” the internal document says.

Fighting Fire with Tweets

But the ITU is deluding itself if its senior management actually believes the current “counter-campaign” has in any way been “successful.” Opposition to WCIT has ramped up since the September retreat, and it is by no means limited to the US and other OECD countries.

Indeed, many countries in the developing world now recognize the ETNO proposal as one that would leave them cut off from most Internet traffic, and resent the ITU’s implicit endorsement of the plan. (Even as late as September, the internal document characterized the sending party tax innocuously as “who pays how much to whom to move traffic” and sniffed that any objection to ETNO’s proposals implied that “developing countries are unable to understand what is in their interests.”)

The hostile response by Internet users to leaked anti-Internet proposals at WCIT is no mystery. Nor is it the result of a vast conspiracy against the ITU. The launch of Google’s campaign, which comes nearly three months after the ITU retreat confidently predicted it had stemmed the tide of negative “press,” is further evidence that the ITU and its media consultants have completely misread the response to WCIT from users not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Instead, as its media playbook advises, the ITU continues to repeat that only the agency’s remarkable foresight in prior efforts at international telephone regulation “paved the way for today’s information and communications technologies.” The document encourages ITU spokespeople to deflect media questions from secrecy, taxes and censorship and say instead that “[t]he revised ITRs have the exciting potential to pave the way for a broadband revolution in the 21st century.”

In a particularly ham-fisted example, the title of Dr. Touré’s recent op-ed in Wired was changed a few days after it appeared from “UN Must Regulate the Internet” to “UN: We Seek to Bring Internet to All,” presumably at the ITU's request. (Contrary to journalistic convention, Wired’s editors made the change without noting or explaining it.)

Of course no one but the ITU believes such inanities. Indeed, the leaked agenda and supporting materials for its recent senior management retreat suggests even the agency’s senior staff is having trouble keeping a straight face.

In fact, the ITU has been caught utterly flat-footed by the response to its Internet power grab. The agency is now straining to paint itself as an innocent victim of negative press intended for other targets.

But whether caused by its own greed or incompetence, the agency deserves the backlash that continues to grow against its efforts to expand its authority and reassert its relevance in the digital age--even if doing so comes at the cost of Internet freedom for some or all users.

Indeed, the leaked internal document makes crystal clear that the agency fundamentally misunderstands the resistance of Internet users to an enhanced UN role in Internet governance, and to proposals that would give repressive governments increased political cover to slow or silence the free flow of information under the guise of implementing a UN treaty.

It isn’t the lack of transparency, in other words, that has outraged users. It’s the terrible ideas the agency is at pains to keep secret within its sometimes-complicit national membership.

Here’s the unvarnished truth, which no PR agency can help the agency talk, tweet, or prevaricate their way around: The commercial Internet emerged and matured entirely since the treaty was last reviewed. It developed in spite of the ITRs, not because of them.

There is a familiar pattern here of ambitious regulators who have no expertise and little experience with the Internet proclaiming themselves its benevolent dictators, only to find the peasants revolting before the coup has even started.

The ITU is no different than the sponsors of ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and other attempts at regulating the Internet, its content, or its users by governments large and small. Like the media lobbyists who continue to see the successful fight to kill SOPA and PIPA as a proxy war waged solely by Google and other Internet companies, the ITU simply can’t accept the reality that Internet users have become their own best advocates.

Without prodding, they readily work together to defend a common-sense faith in self-governance for engineering resources and an unshakable belief in a free marketplace of ideas, the cornerstones of the Internet’s success.

The UN is just the latest would-be savior that believes itself the only solution to governance problems that are largely non-existent. And they are being aided and abetted in this delusion by national governments and others who are determined to turn off the free flow of information however they can, whether through legal or technological means, or both.

The only things broken on the Web have been broken by governments. As the ITU's continued fumbling makes ever-clearer, the UN is ill-suited to play any role in the continued development of the digital economy. And the ITRs are no place to deal with real or imagined Internet issues. No one but the ITU's management and their client governments could ever think otherwise.

Fortunately for Internet users, setting up a Twitter feed and loading a Facebook page with lectures on the agency’s patronizing sense of noblesse oblige isn’t going to change that reality one bit.

Internet users already know that. The ITU and its media consultants will learn it soon enough.

That is, assuming its senior bureaucrats stop telling themselves consoling fairy tales at retreats in the Swiss countryside long enough for reality to set in.

With the WCIT meeting only a few weeks away, who knows what will leak out next? Follow me on Twitter @LarryDownes to find out.